his nose and his cheekbones and prominent chin and the plates of his skull. He looks like a polished Roman coin.
For a few seconds everyone is silent, waiting for Malcolm’s first question. But suddenly Fife says that he’s going to answer a question that no one knows to ask today. Or no one is rude enough to ask. It was asked of him many times long ago and over the years, asked privately and in public and presumably answered truthfully and completely over and over, so to ask it yet again would be either stupid or insulting. And to ask it on this particular occasion would seem stupid or insulting or both, when in fact it is neither.
The question, he says, is simply this: Why did you decide in the spring of 1968 to leave the United States and migrate to Canada?
For nearly fifty years he has been answering that question, creating and reaffirming the widespread belief, at least among Canadians, that Leonard Fife was one of the more than sixty thousand young American men who fled to Canada in the late 1960s and early 1970s in order to avoid being sent by the US military to Vietnam. Those sixty thousand men were either draft dodgers or deserters. For half a century Leonard Fife was believed to be a draft dodger. It’s what he claimed on the day he crossed the border from Vermont into Canada and asked for asylum. He’s claimed it ever since that day.
The truth, however, as always, is more complicated and ambiguous. Therefore, consider the preceding as merely a preface. For here begins Malcolm MacLeod’s controversial film Oh, Canada. Although brilliantly shot and edited by MacLeod and produced by his wife Diana in the late Leonard Fife’s own manner, it is in some ways a disheartening, disillusioning film about Fife, one of Canada’s most celebrated and admired documentary filmmakers. Oh, Canada shocked and disappointed the millions of Canadians who admired Leonard Fife for being one of those sixty thousand Americans who fled north in the late 1960s to escape being sent by the American government to kill or die in Vietnam. While his filmed deathbed confession may have been cathartic for Fife himself, it has brought many Canadians to question their past and present national policy of offering asylum to so-called refugees. Refugees are people who have fled their countries because of a well-founded fear of persecution if they return home. They are assumed to have seen or experienced many horrors. A refugee is different from an immigrant. An immigrant is a person who chooses to settle permanently in another country. Refugees are thought to have been forced to flee. Leonard Fife claimed to be a refugee.
2
Fife is well aware that the seeds were planted years earlier, in childhood and adolescence. Possibly they were planted in his parents’ lives even before he was born. But the night of March 30, 1968, fifty years ago, was when the poisonous flower first bloomed. So he begins his account there, in Richmond, Virginia, in the home of his in-laws, Jessie and Benjamin Chapman. They are the parents of his wife, whose name is Alicia Chapman, he adds. They are not the parents of Emma Flynn.
He remembers the dining room table being cleared by a maid, a middle-aged Black woman. He can’t bring her face or her name to mind, he says. There were many Black servants employed by the Chapmans, but he can only remember the faces and names of two. There is the cook, Susannah, a stout, green-eyed dark-brown woman in her mid-fifties who wears a hairnet and a starched white short-sleeved dress and soft-soled white shoes and black socks. To Susannah’s apparent amusement, Fife calls her Oh Susannah whenever he rises early and eats alone in the breakfast room adjacent to the kitchen. Which, when he and Alicia and their son Cornel stay overnight at the Chapman home in Richmond, is nearly every morning. Fife is an early riser. No one else in the family is. Susannah prepares the family’s every meal six days a week. One of the other servants, a woman whose face or name he can’t remember, cooks the family meals on Sundays.
And there is Sally. He has no trouble remembering her. Twenty-seven years earlier she was his wife Alicia’s nanny. Twenty years before that, she was Alicia’s mother’s nanny down in Charleston. Now she is his son Cornel’s. At least when Fife and Alicia visit Richmond, she is. Sally is a tall, slightly bent woman, perhaps seventy-five years old, possibly older, he’s unsure, and when he asked Alicia and her mother, they weren’t sure, either. He doesn’t feel comfortable asking Sally herself. Her personal life seems off-limits, mutually agreed upon, as if to make it nonexistent.
Sally retired, Alicia’s mother Jessie told Fife, when Alicia went north to attend Simmons College, which is to say that she is no longer employed by the Chapmans, except when intermittently brought out of her retirement to watch over Cornel during their visits from Charlottesville. In Chapman family photographs, when Sally would have been in her fifties—a broad-shouldered Black woman holding little Alicia’s hand at six or seven outside Saint Stephen’s Episcopal Church on Grove Avenue—she was very dark, but in old age her complexion has lightened to the colour of taffy. She is handsome and mild and moves with deliberate, slow grace. She, too, wears a hairnet and white dress, but always with a dark-red cardigan sweater buttoned over her dress or draped across her shoulders, as if the central air-conditioning system keeps the Chapmans’ Richmond home too cold for her old Charleston bones. Describing her, Fife realizes that it’s Sally who his Haitian nurse Renée reminds him of—though he doesn’t say it aloud.
Other than Susannah and Sally, in Fife’s mind the Chapmans’ servants were then and still are nameless and interchangeable. He remembers them by their jobs—yardman, laundress, housekeeper, maid. He says he feels guilty for that.
But he doesn’t want to linger over his venial sins, his many small crimes and misdemeanours committed decades ago in a different country by a different man. It’s the mortal sins he’s confessing here, sins committed in this country by this man. Confession, followed by repentance and atonement, leads to forgiveness. That’s his plan, his only purpose now. His final hope, actually.
He hears Renée slide open the pocket door to the hall and step from the room and close the door again. Her departure does not break the darkness that surrounds his body or the silence that swallows his voice. Since the filming began, no one other than Fife has said a word or coughed or cleared a throat or laid down a footstep. He is sure that it was Renée leaving the room, not Emma. Emma still sits behind him somewhere over on his right. He feels the heat of her presence there, imagines the blood rushing to her face and ears as she hears the names of a wife and son she never knew existed, the catch of her breath as she learns of an American household and family that until now have been no more real than characters in a novel she has not read.
Fife’s son Cornel is just over three years old. He is an intelligent and articulate child, easy to please and eager to please. So like his mother at that age, his grandmother began noting shortly after he was born. It’s one of the Chapmans’ many unspoken ways of making Fife’s son a Chapman, more Alicia’s child than his. Tonight Cornel sleeps upstairs in the nursery, the same small room and narrow four-poster bed where his mother slept when she was three years old. Nanny Sally sits in the upholstered straight-backed chair beside his bed, silently reading her Bible in the dimmed, peach-tinted light.
Cornel’s mother Alicia is twenty-seven, the same age as Fife. She sits across the dining room table from him, her parents at either end. Her long, straight, shining cordovan-coloured hair is in sharp contrast with her bright white complexion and large grey-blue eyes. Light seems to emanate from her face. Her skin is flawless, without blemish or freckle or the tiniest disfiguration anywhere on her body, as he knows better than anyone. She never wears dark or bright lipstick or powdery makeup or costume jewellery and stays well away from the sun’s tanning rays, even though she was raised to be an athlete and is a competitive equestrian, plays a strong game of tennis, and has a golf handicap of nine. She does not hide from the sun, she merely protects herself from it. Fife himself is afraid of horses and has never played tennis or golf. Alicia is a natural beauty, people say, an impression she has done nothing since adolescence to discourage. She is known and admired both for that natural beauty and for her endless affection for children and animals, as if they are kindred spirits and she is herself a child or an animal. She volunteers at the Charlottesville
